Queers for Palestine Film Festival

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Resisting Frameline’s Complicity with Israeli Apartheid

Outside the Frame was a Smashing Success!

Over 800 people attended Outside the Frame: Queers for Palestine Film Festival during the weekend of June 19-21, 2015. The free festival at San Francisco’s historic Brava Theater was conceived as a radical alternative to Frameline’s annual SF LGBT film festival and a protest of Frameline’s longtime partnership with the Israeli consulate. OTF presented a wide range of outstanding work created by film makers who declined to screen their work at Frameline as long as it continues to defy the international call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel (BDS).

A (Free!) Film Festival for the Rest of Us

As members of queer communities we are creating Outside the Frame, a film festival that challenges Frameline’s complicity with Israeli apartheid. This festival will feature the work of filmmakers who have withdrawn their work from Frameline or did not submit because of Frameline’s continued partnership with the Israeli government. OTF will include films from others who believe in, and whose work supports, LGBTQI visual culture’s role in the anti-imperial struggle.

Outside the Frame will present cutting edge films, as well as live performance, that place the gay/lesbian agenda in the context of broader international movements for justice. Outside the Frame brings together filmmakers and performance artists opposed to Israeli policies in Palestine and in protest of the pinkwashing of Frameline film festival through the Israeli Consulate’s cash donations.

Outside the Frame goes back to the roots of queer liberation and re-imagines futures for radical social change. Outside the Frame is anti-capitalist and refuses to take governmental or corporate grants. All programs are free and open to everyone.

Liberation Not Assimilation

Outside the Frame calls on all queers to join in questioning what has become the dominant narrative of assimilation rather than liberation. Part of that narrative is that Israel is a “friend” of queers simply because it gives money to a queer cultural event, or supports the production of a queer film that will be used as propaganda for Israel. As queer activists for social justice, including Palestinian liberation, we recognize that Israel is attempting to co-opt the queer struggle for liberation while the Israeli government continues to kill, exclude and deny rights to Palestinians, including Queer Palestinians. This is pinkwashing, and Frameline must stop participating in it. Instead, Frameline must publicly commit to honor the Cultural and Academic boycott called by the Palestinian people in 2005 and sever their ties with the Israeli government until such time as the Palestinian people call off the boycott.